Diane von Fürstenberg

Diane von Fürstenberg

Diane von Fürstenberg is a fashion designer best known for her hallmark wrap dress.

Born Diane Simone Michelle Halfin on December 31, 1945 in Brussels, Belgium into an upper-middle class, highly assimilated Jewish household, to a Russian-born father, Leon Halfin, who spent the war in Switzerland and a Greek-born mother, Liliane Nahmias, who was a Holocaust survivor (see [1]).

Diane Halfin studied economics at the University of Geneva in Switzerland and while there she met Austro-Italian Prince Egon of Fürstenberg. They married and moved to New York City in 1969 where son Alexandre and daughter Tatiana were born. Divorced shortly after the birth of her second child, she began her own business, entering the U.S. clothing market selling knit dresses. She is most famous for introducing the "wrap dress" in 1973, an example of which, due to its important influence on women's fashion, is on display at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Fürstenberg has started a number of successful businesses including a line of cosmetics and has ventured into the home-shopping business, which she started in 1991. In 1985 she moved to Paris, France where she founded Salvy, a French-language publishing house. From her design and marketing studio in a 19th century carriage house in West Greenwich Village in New York City, she currently creates a line of high-end women's apparel which is only offered in the most elite stores such as Bergdorf Goodman, Nordstrom, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Neiman Marcus.

In 1997, after more than a decade, she relaunched her high-end line. The collection has been successful, and von Furstenberg has been expanding to cities like L.A. and Paris, and bought a larger space in the meatpacking district in Manhattan. By 2005, the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) [2] awarded her a lifetime achievement award. In 2006, she was the CFDA president.

In 1998 she published her memoirs "DIANE: A Signature Life."

In 2001, she married American media mogul Barry Diller, and the following year she became a naturalized U.S. citizen.

In 2006, she appeared as a judge on several episodes of the Bravo reality television program Project Runway. Also, Diane teamed up with T-Mobile to design her own Limited Edition Sidekick 3, currently in stores.

As a designer, she uses von with her name instead of the proper zu used with the Fürstenberg titles (as the latter is rarely encountered outside of Europe). With her second marriage she lost any pretensions to being a princess (which was doubtful in the first place due to family laws), but properly she would have been Diane Prinzessin zu Fürstenberg.

Diane splits her time between New York, Paris, L.A. and Connecticut.

External links

• Diane von Fürstenberg Online
• Interview with Newsweek magazine